How is it already December? If you’re like us, you probably haven’t done a lick of holiday shopping for friends and family this holiday season. Not to worry! If you need ideas for gifts for sports fans, we’ve got you covered. Check out our gift guide for sports enthusiasts if you’re not sure what to get them this year.

Image credit: igloocoolers.com

1. Tailgater Magazine subscription - To borrow words from Cousin Eddie, this is the gift that keeps on giving the whole year. Our buddies over at Tailgater Magazine put together some great content on all things tailgating. A monthly subscription for your friend or family member will cover awesome tailgating products you can check out for future games, delicious food and drink recipes to take your tailgate setup to another level, and other great ways to get pumped about tailgating.

2. Igloo Party Bar Liddup® - Did we mention this puppy is part of our season-long fan photo contest? Mobile, sturdy, and featuring plenty of space for all of your favorite chilled beverages, this cooler is the peak of serious tailgating gear. It even has a built-in bottle opener that’ll catch all those bottle tops! If you’re in a pinch for time, grab one of these from the Igloo website. We’d love to see a pic of one at your next tailgate!

Image credit: kohls.com

3. Verus Sports 3-in-1 Tailgate Set - Purists might turn up their noses at the idea of an apparatus that combines three distinct tailgating games into one package, but we think this thing is pretty freakin’ handy, especially for a tailgater on a budget! Move between games of bean bag toss, washer toss, and ladder ball with just a few easy adjustments. Grab a setup for your friend today and they’ll thank you for seasons to come.

4. Kijaro Dual Lock® folding chairs - A solid, dependable tailgating chair is a must for any serious sports fan. It needs to be lightweight, easy to collapse, and strong enough to carry a sports fan with a full belly of wings and snacks. The Kijaro Dual Lock® chair fits the bill. The locking mechanisms on the legs keep the chair firmly in place, it features two cup holders and a mesh back to encourage air flow, and the legs feature reinforced crossbars to keep you comfortably upright. We’re giving away a pair of these in our fan photo contest as well!

5. Game Bibs striped overalls - We couldn’t complete a tailgater’s gift guide without game bibs, right? Our game day bibs are colorfully striped, keep in the heat on cold days and keep out the heat on cool days, they go great with all sorts of sports attire, and we offer them in nearly every color combination imaginable. Your sports fan friends and family members will thank you when you help them stand out from the crowd on game day.

If you’re drawing blanks this holiday season on what to get your sports fan friends (or maybe yourself) then go with a few tailgating essentials like the ones above. What would you add to the Game Bibs gift guide? Leave us a comment below mentioning some of your favorite tailgating gear!

It’s no secret that football fans are willing to sacrifice and suffer to support their favorite teams. They fight the sweltering heat during the first half of the season and endure the icy blast of winter as the season comes to a close. As games get more important, tailgating and bleacher-sitting gets more unbearable—oftentimes because you’ve inadvertently become a human icicle.

Luckily, we’ve compiled a short list of tailgate recipes for cold weather that will boost your spirits while you wallow in your truck bed waiting for kickoff. Here’s a countdown of our five must-have foods for tackling tailgating in the frozen tundra:

5. Tuna Salad Sandwiches

Firing up a charcoal grill can be incredibly difficult in cold conditions, so it’s important to come prepared with a backup, premade meal that don’t require heat. For a fast and filling meal, bring tuna salad to your tailgate. Grab a few tuna cans, mayo, apples, onions and celery. Dice up the ingredients, mix them all together and enjoy! The best aspect of this tailgate option is its convenience—a batch of tuna salad sandwiches can be whipped up in mere minutes!

4. Chili Queso Dip

No tailgate, regardless of weather, is complete without chips and dip. We suggest adding some Southwestern spice to your tailgate with this fantastic chili queso cheese dip. A chip’s perfect companion, this queso dip will melt in your mouth and provide you with a little extra meat for fuel.

3. Breakfast Tacos

This is a great option for tailgaters who are brave enough to bring out their grills and are looking for energy before a chilly morning game. To get started, whip up some scrambled eggs in a skillet and toast a package of tortillas. Bring a variety of pre-cut toppings in baggies and let the whole tailgate customize their tacos! A huge plus to this option is the taco’s portability. You can move amongst tailgates at will with the contents of your taco wrapped securely in a tortilla!

When you set up, keep in mind the position of your grill relative to the wind—you don’t want your smoke to bother neighboring tailgates.

2. Frito Pie

Heat up your crockpot and take your tailgate to a whole new level with some delicious Frito pie. This family favorite is easy to make—simply cook ground beef alongside beans and tomatoes on the stove or in a crockpot. For the finishing touch, add cheese and some delicious Frito corn chips! Check out our favorite Frito chili pie recipe here.

A team’s color scheme has a lot of intention behind it. From which color is more prominent to how all the colors are displayed, it all conveys a brand and a swagger that sports teams and brands take very seriously. You can most likely rattle off a slew of teams just by looking at a combination of colors, but do you know why those teams chose the colors they did? Here’s a little history lesson on some of the most popular color schemes in sports today.

1 - Every sports team in the city of Pittsburgh wears a combination of black and yellow. It makes for a very cool effect when sports fans can wear any team’s apparel to any sporting event, but why the uniformity across all sports? The flag of the city is actually colored black and gold, so the decision seemed pretty easy for sports team owners.

2 - The University of Michigan doesn’t wear your run-of-the-mill navy and yellow. They trot out all of their sports teams in maize and blue. History says the blue started popping up on graduation diploma ribbons in 1859, but the color combination wasn’t officially adopted until 1867. The exact shade of each color wasn’t chosen until a few decades later, but that distinctly rich yellow is what sets this color scheme apart from the rest.

Then...Photo credit: NFL.com

...and nowPhoto credit: seahawks.com

3 - The Seattle Seahawks have become one of the most popular football teams of the last few years, combining speed with hard-hitting defense and flashy uniforms to create a style all their own. Back when the team joined the NFL in 1976, their colors were more traditional with a royal blue and kelly green combination which was based on Northwestern Native American tribal art. Since then, they’ve modified their colors to a navy blue and neon green. Interestingly, all of the current Seattle sports franchises have some variation of green and blue, making the city the closest competitor to Pittsburgh in terms of color uniformity across all sports.

4 - Ohio State wears what is officially referred to as scarlet and gray for all of their sports uniforms. The color red is bold and assertive, just like Ohio State is when they’re competing. There’s actually not much of an anecdote behind why they chose these colors. The story says that three students in a lecture room chose the colors in 1878 because they were a pleasing color combination that hadn’t been used by any other college at the time. The unique combo has stayed unique all these years!

Photo credit: remembertheABA.com

5 - The San Antonio Spurs and their familiar black, silver and white color scheme started out as a red, white and blue-clad team called the Dallas Chapparals in the ABA. The color scheme made sense given the state flag of Texas and strong Texas pride among its citizens, but once the ABA merged with the NBA, relocation and a name change was in order. Some speculate that silver was introduced to replicate the look of actual boot spurs. Regardless of the exact reasons why, the Spurs and their simple, unique color scheme have carved a nice little home for themselves in NBA history.

6 - For fun, we’ll throw in a sixth. Ever wondered how the New York Mets got their orange and blue color scheme? When the Mets began play in 1962, they were one of MLB’s first expansion teams and acted as a city replacement for the relocated Giants and Dodgers. To that end, the powers that be decided their uniforms and colors should represent all of the New York City franchises that had come before them. They borrowed orange from the Giants, blue from the Dodgers and pinstripes from the Yankees.

What are some of your favorite color combinations? Let us know in the comments below!

Another week, another edition of NFL’s Thursday Night Color Rush game. This past week produced the most colorful matchup to date, with the Broncos wearing orange and the Chargers wearing navy blue. What set this matchup aside from previous ones was that both teams had their uniforms designed to resemble uniforms they wore in decades past. Let’s take a closer look.

Photo credit: uni-watch.com

The NFL has a strict policy on players wearing one helmet shell per season to try and prevent concussions, so both teams utilized their existing helmets with some changes that will remind veteran fans of decades past. The Broncos replaced their current side profile logo with the old Denver D and a helmet stripe down the middle, which will remind any fan of their ‘80s lids. Their jerseys and pants both trade out navy blue for royal blue and revert back to block numbering, very reminiscent of their old uniform.

The Chargers replaced their navy facemask with a yellow one and replaced their navy blue color with royal blue. Both moves pay tribute their late ‘70s and early ‘80s look. You could say the white helmet pays tribute to their ‘70s look as well, but since they already wear a white helmet it’s a current design.

For anyone looking for a bit of nostalgia, this Color Rush game certainly had it. If you’re like us, you think both of these teams should revert their uniforms back to what they wore in decades past, but after a few lackluster weeks of Color Rush uniforms, it was definitely nice to see a color-on-color game. Next week puts the navy blue-clad Bears up against the all-white Packers. What do you think of this week’s uniforms? Let us know in the comments below!

The last few Color Rush games have been pretty tame (but did you see the Dolphins in bright orange?) so we haven’t given our thoughts on the monochrome Thursday night games since they first started, but we’re back this week to talk a bit about the Cardinals and the 49ers in last night’s Color Rush game.

Photo credit: NFL.com

The matchup featured the Cardinals in a monochrome white uniform and the 49ers in a monochrome black uniform. You can argue the Cardinals were wearing their standard uniform which doesn’t make for much of a “special” design for the Color Rush games. The one change they had from their standard design was solid white socks. The 49ers, on the other hand, took the black to the max. You may remember them trotting out in black uniforms before, and your opinion of them probably depends on how you feel about black being used as a uniform color for teams without black in their color scheme. They added all-black socks for a full-black look, minus the gold helmets.

Here at Game Bibs, we’re all about rocking your team’s color scheme in full. To that end, the black is pretty jarring for us. We get it, there’s a bit of black in their logo and the color is intimidating, but true gold and red are a unique color combination in the NFL, so it’s a shame they didn’t try something with one of those colors instead. They could’ve added a red facemask to really up the color factor, too. As for the Cardinals, this design isn’t really a shift away from their standard road uniforms which made it seem like they were punting on the whole theme of the game.

As jarring to the eyes as it might’ve been, a game featuring the Cardinals in all red and the Niners in all gold would’ve done better to keep in line with the theme of these games. 1.5 out of 5 stars for us. What do you think? Leave us a comment below!

Color Rush 2016 is back in full force in the NFL, with the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets debuting the first Thursday game of the season with monochrome uniforms. If you’re unfamiliar with Color Rush, it’s a promotion by the NFL in which every Thursday night game features teams wearing a special uniform that’s one, solid color – usually their secondary, less-featured color.

The Jets and Bills played each other last year in monochrome green and red, respectively. For the non-colorblind spectators, it looked like Christmas out on the field, but for anyone with red-green colorblindness, they could barely tell the teams apart. It didn’t help things that both teams wear white-based helmets! So how did they do this year?

The NFL learned their lesson and featured the Jets in an all-white getup. To differentiate this one from their normal road uniform, their helmets had a white facemask instead of the usual green. The Bills, meanwhile, were decked out from shoulder to toe in bright red. They normally wear blue at home, so red was another chance to highlight their secondary color. This photo from Uni-Watch.com fives a great look at the white facemask the Jets were wearing. It’s interesting that the Bills didn’t follow suit with a red facemask to keep with the theme. Missed opportunity!

If you ask us, these uniforms don’t have enough stripes ;) and need some more vertical accents to get a high grade from us. That being said, the color schemes of both teams are classic, which means there aren’t too many chances to mess up a good thing. The same-color socks definitely give everything too much of a “pajama” look, but it fits with what the league is trying to do. Compared to last year’s colorblind fiasco, we’d give this matchup 3 out of 5 stars. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Nothing gets the crowd on its feet and the energy level rocking like a great entrance by the home team. In college football, entrances are a time-honored tradition, with plenty of schools developing routines that are equal parts nostalgia and intimidating. We’ve pulled together a short list of what we think are some of the top entrances in college football. Let’s see if you agree.

Photo credit: blog.oregonlive.com

Colorado runs a live buffalo out onto the field before every football game. Since 1967, the university has been doing this unique (and absolutely terrifying) routine with a line of buffaloes all named Ralphie. The animal is carefully handled by a team of runners all holding straps, but the idea of a thundering beast running at full speed gives us nightmares.

Clemson’s football team runs down a hill as they enter Memorial Stadium. At the top of that hill is Howard’s Rock, which each player touches before making the sprint down to the field. There’s nothing quite like 100 or so big football players round down a hill at full speed, and their entrance gets the Tigers fans in the right frame of mind for a big game.

Virginia Tech plays Metallica’s Enter Sandman before their football team takes the field and has been doing so since 2000. Imagine 65,000+ screaming and jumping fans while that iconic guitar riff blares through the loud speakers. Then imagine all of them losing their minds as soon as the football team rushes out of the tunnel. As one of the most famous college football entrances, Virginia Tech certainly knows how to build the hype.

Photo credit: kccollegegameday.com

The Tennessee Volunteers run through a massive T comprised of the Pride of Southland Marching Band before every home football game. There’s no smoke or build-up, but pair this tradition with the fact that Tennessee’s stadium holds more than 100,000 fans and you’ve got a chilling, memorable college entrance that shouldn’t be missed.

The Auburn Tigers let an eagle soar through their stadium before kickoff. You read that right. Although Auburn’s mascot is a tiger, their more-than-a-century-old battle cry features the iconic “war eagle” phrase, so an eagle and its handler have been a staple of pre-game traditions in Auburn for years.

What do you think are some of the best college football entrances? Share them with us in the comments below!